Should I Be Writing Faster?
I was a member of the same health club for over twenty years and lots of people there read my Nick Hoffman mysteries set in a college town that possibly reminded them of the town we live in. No matter when I published a book in the series, somebody always asked me, "So when's the next one coming out?"
That could happen the very same week there was a big article in a local paper or a couple of local radio interviews.
And if there was no news I had to offer about another book due to appear, telling people that I’d recently published a book didn’t seem to count. I got blank stares. The assumption seemed to be that I'm lazy. Writers apparently should be churning out more than one book a year. Two or three, really.
My publishing schedule has never been regular over 30+ years. Some years I haven't published anything and one year I published three different books (in different genres) just because that's how the publishers' schedules worked out, not because I'd actually written three in one year.
My second novel took almost twenty years to finish. Yes, twenty--while I was writing other books, of course. That's because I kept re-thinking and re-conceiving it, starting and stopping, trying to figure out what exactly its shape should be. And then there were the tricky interconnected questions of voice and POV.
I'm glad I did, because The German Money got one of the best reviews of my entire career. The Washington Post compared me to Kafka, Philip Roth and John le Carré and I was sent on book tours in England and Germany to promote the editions published there.
But some books took me only a year or even as little as six months to finish for various reasons. So when people ask me "How long does it take you to write a book?" there's no definite answer.
You can't explain that to the cheerful guys who call you "Dude!" and ask about your next book while you're on the way to the showers just wearing a towel and flip-flops. Or people who decide to chat with you while you're sweating on the treadmill.
The majority of folks seem to think that there's a simple answer to questions about the writing life and that popping out another book can't be difficult, since it's not as if writing is a real job, anyway, right? :-)
Image by FitnessStore112 from Pixabay
As the late, great Orson Welles said, "I will sell no wine before its time."
At least my doctor (lawyer, accountant, dentist, psychologist, etc.) friends understand what it takes to be a writer. They're always telling me about the poems, plays, screenplays, and novels they would write if only they had the time.